"Spain - Eximbank's Billion Dollar Client": The Role of the US Financing the Spanish Nuclear Program

Mª del Mar Rubio-Varas () and Joseba De la Torre ()
Additional contact information
Mª del Mar Rubio-Varas: Universidad Pública de Navarra
Joseba De la Torre: Universidad Pública de Navarra
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Maria del Mar Rubio Varas

No 1603, Documentos de Trabajo (DT-AEHE) from Asociación Española de Historia Económica

Abstract: In 1972, Henry Kearns, President and Chairman, Export-Import Bank of the United States (Eximbank) visited the Official Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Madrid. The title of his speech “Spain—Eximbank’s Billion Dollar Client” gave notice of the important role that the public American bank had for financing the Spanish purchases of capital equipment: aircrafts, steel mills, satellite grown stations, power plants, etc. The heavy concentration on new power facilities at the time made Spain the fastest growing nuclear power developer in Europe, and the largest nuclear power buyer from the US with Eximbank’s support head-to-head with Japan. No other nation approached these two in that respect. Investigating archival materials from the Eximbank and the National Archives and Record Administration of the United States (NARA), we explore the financial facilities the US provided to the Spanish nuclear program, the size of the authorised credits and its evolution over time. It became apparent that the role of the US in pumping public money for exporting nuclear facilities to the world explain a great deal of the US quasi-monopoly of global nuclear market before the 1980s, and in particular for turning Spain into an early adopter and champion adopter of nuclear technology.

Keywords: Nuclear energy; Eximbank; export subsidies. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N2 N4 N5 N7 Q43 Q48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2016-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://media.timtul.com/media/web_aehe/dt-aehe-1603_20240108094520.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ahe:dtaehe:1603

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documentos de Trabajo (DT-AEHE) from Asociación Española de Historia Económica Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Andreu Seguí Beltrán ().